Dear friends,
Yesterday I have submitted three Internet-drafts (deadlines
make me work :-) connected to the topic of internationalization
of internet identifiers. They should soon appear in the IETF
anouncements and on the respective ftp servers. You can already
obtain them as:
ftp://ftp.ifi.unizh.ch/outgoing/draft-duerst-dns-i18n-01.txtftp://ftp.ifi.unizh.ch/outgoing/draft-duerst-i18n-norm-00.txtftp://ftp.ifi.unizh.ch/outgoing/draft-duerst-query-i18n-00.txt
The first draft describes a method to internationalize DNS
easily without having to change the core DNS software in any
way. It is an update of a draft that expired a few weeks ago.
With enough consensus, this could go into experimental phase
rather quickly.
The second draft is an *initial attempt* at defining normalization
and additional guidelines for international identifiers. This
is necessary to eliminate bad user surprises, but does not have
very high priority as the normalization rules can be defined so
that most current systems and users anyway only produce already
normalized identifiers.
The third draft contains material about the problem of internationalizing
the query component in URLs. This is a particularly important, but
also particularly tricky part of URL internationalization. The
draft describes a convention currently used by most browsers
(and working in many cases), and some additions to the HTTP
protocol (intended to be version-independent) for a safe upgrade
to UTF-8 URLs. The basic idea should be sound; the syntax and
terminology may need more work.
I am glad about any feedback directly back to me or on any of
the lists I am posting this information. I appologize to those
that get this information more than once. I will also be in
Munich and look forward to talk to anybody interested.
However, because most parties seriously interested in URL
internationalization (their number is steadily increasing :-)
have indicated that they won't be able to attend Munich,
I have unfortunately had to cancel a planned official meeting
(the specific topic of the meeting was that of the second draft
above). I hope that a meeting will become reality at a later
IETF. One occasion where there will certainly be a lot of
discussion about internationalized URLs, just because many
of the players happen to attend or be around, will be the
upcomming 11th International Unicode Conference in early
September in San Jose.
Regards, Martin.